The Boggart
by dqgilly
Summary: Oneshot about a fearless girl, and her encounter with the one thing she was truly scared of.


She was most definitely the bravest student at Hogwarts, and everybody knew. Nobody had ever seen her afraid, not in the years of stress and horrifying lessons they'd been through. On the day of the boggart lesson, everybody was buzzing, incredibly curious, excited to finally discover what had the power to scare her.

At first, when she stepped up to the boggart, it seemed to shift into something recognizable, something everybody else could identify. Then it simply vanished, invisible, making no sound or movement whatsoever. Some kids laughed, amused and amazed that she was truly afraid of nothing. Others rolled their eyes; they had been looking forward to seeing her as normal for once.

Her face was steely, and if you were paying attention you might've seen her ears darken, just a little, under her hair. Turning to the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, who themselves looked stunned, she tried to speak. "I-"

"Blimey, I didn't expect the rumors to be true," The professor laughed, interrupting what nobody would ever know was going to be a stutter. "An absolutely fearless girl. I've never seen this in my life."

This comment encouraged the others. "It's like she isn't even human," One boy said with a dumb smile on his face.

"She's not human, you moron, she's a witch," Another girl corrected.

"She's obviously not that, either." The boy's friend spoke up, chuckling in that way that can't help but be mean.

The fearless girl crossed her arms, the slight shake imperceptible, and rolled her eyes. "May I please go to the bathroom?"

The professor nodded, waving the next student up to the closet. The boggart materialized an inch from his face, and he screamed. The girl left, forcing herself not to run.

When she got into a stall, safely in the empty first-floor bathroom where Moaning Myrtle haunted, she broke down. Crying so hard she felt light headed, it was all she could manage to stop to take a few shaky breaths before the incident returned to her head and she started weeping all over again, until Myrtle floated into her stall.

"Merlin's beard, if I told them how much _you_ moan in here, they'd probably take away my nickname and give it to you," The ghost giggled, leaning against the stall and falling through the wood like it was fog. When she popped back through, her expression was much more serious. "What's wrong this time? I've never seen you quite this bad."

The fearless girl sniffed, tried to steel herself. "We did the boggarts today in class."

Myrtle cocked her head, one of her braids sliding over her shoulder. "Oh, are you upset everyone's _finally_ seen that the fearless girl isn't quite so fearless? _I'm_ curious, to be honest. Tell me, what's your boggart?"

"When…when I walked up to it, it disappeared."

Her ghostly jaw dropped. "Are you serious? Bloody hell, I've never heard of that happening. I didn't expect you to _actually_ be fearless, after all of these years you've spent crying in _my_ bathroom."

"That's the—that's the whole _problem_ ," The girl, perhaps by this point a little less fearless, shook her head miserably, starting to hiccup. "I'm not."

She looked Myrtle in the eye, and the dead girl faded, as all of ghosts tend to when looked at so directly; most students don't know this, because most students never dare to try. As friendly as most of the ghosts were, the barrier between alive and the alternative still held a scared little place in most of their hearts. The fearless girl, to her credit, never shied from it, until one day when one ghost asked her to try and refrain from doing it quite as often as she did.

Myrtle liked it, though. Myrtle, a teenaged girl that died youngest of them all, could almost pretend that she was living again this way.

"I was alone. I finally had a chance to prove that I wasn't so different, and the bloody boggart had to go and _disappear_." She kicked the toilet rather hard, and Myrtle couldn't help but jump. "I'm the _fearless girl_ , yeah? Not even human, not even a _witch_ , they were all saying. And it was like, not only was the boggart gone, not _only_ did it point out the one thing I'm, I'm petrified of, but it did even more to set me apart. To tear me away. Because nobody expects the _fearless_ girl, the _untouchable_ girl, to be scared of being _alone_."


End file.
